


i wrestled with my bruised hours, just to lie there next to you

by ladderax (allnuthatchforest)



Category: Warchild Series - Karin Lowachee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:29:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allnuthatchforest/pseuds/ladderax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jos's place will always be right between them, even when he doesn't feel like it should be."</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wrestled with my bruised hours, just to lie there next to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boywonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boywonder/gifts).



> For boywonder, who wanted something inspired by the prompt "Jos's place will always be right between them, even when he doesn't feel like it should be." Title from Penzance by Patrick Wolf. Contains oblique references to past canon sexual abuse.

1.

It's strange seeing the captain in Niko's clothes. He still walks as though he doesn't know quite what to do with himself, though it’s less awkward than it was seeing Niko in Azarcon's suit and tie last week. Part of it is surely that he’s still adjusting to planetary gravity, a force he hadn't reckoned with since he was twelve years old on Meridia. 

Jos hangs back a little, watching. It occurs to him that he doesn’t even know where Niko is anymore, so transfixed is he by the sight of the Aaian-na winds wreaking havoc with Azarcon's hair and whipping his--Niko's--black robes about his slim frame. 

Azarcon is stepping down the slimy, moss-covered steps of the G'jhalo-na, the Temple of the Seas, a structure so old it was built when the striviirc-na still believed in supernatural forces and shared their world with the sapient species they called the Day People. The steps of the Temple don’t end with the water's edge; they continue as if there were no difference between land and sea, and Niko explained this was intentional, not simply an effect of erosion. The supplicants who came to the Temple were meant to continue walking downward, and then to kneel beneath the water, to come to acknowledge the sea as a part of their lives and nae and not something to be lived around.

"All this tourist stuff is probably boring you," a voice close to him says. Jos looks up and realizes that Azarcon had walked back toward him while he'd been looking the other way.

Jos rubs the fabric of his robe between his fingers. "I haven't seen it in a long time. I didn't appreciate it when I was younger, so I'd sort of wanted to see it again. You like it?" He knows his conversation has been pretty feeble on this trip, but it's easier for Jos when he knows where he stands in relation to people; Azarcon isn't exactly his captain right now, but he certainly isn't his friend, either. 

Azarcon nods. "I don't understand the complete lack of curiosity about this place from EarthHub central. Not just this place, I mean--this whole planet. We make contact with an intelligent species, and we don't even want to know what their music is like, or what they eat, or how they live? It's so un-human to me, that lack of curiosity."

"Were you curious?" Jos asks. "You did a lot of blowing up their ships before you got to this point."

Azarcon smiles. "Yeah. Well. When you're raised to think of people as monsters, it's awfully easy to be incurious. Humans are silly like that. When something is truly terrible, truly destructive, they can't leave it alone. But if it's just other people who live their lives differently, they don't want to know a thing about them." 

Jos sees Niko then out of the corner of his eye. Niko is walking into the water with no concern for his clothes getting wet, watching a bird with a long neck and iridescent scarlet wings turn black as it flies across the sun. 

"You're ta--" Jos starts to say. Something he would've said if it had been just them alone, but he realizes he can't say those sorts of things with Azarcon there. 

Nor can he run to Niko the way he wants to right now as Niko turns to look at him, eyes shining in a way that makes him wish he could doff his robe entirely, wish that they could swim together, slick skin and quick, panted breaths.

  


2\. 

Azarcon doesn't know.

He doesn't know that when Jos is on Turundrlar he climbs into Niko's bed after the day's work is done, runs his fingers beneath the collar of his robe and breathes against his cheek until he has the courage to kiss. That all of it was Jos's idea from the beginning.

Azarcon can't know, Niko says. At first Niko had refused to lie with him at all on those grounds, saying he couldn't ask Jos to lie or keep secrets from his captain. Afraid that the knowledge that Jos was learning about touch and physical release from a man with such power over him would jeopardize Azarcon's opinion of Niko and, thus, the negotiations. But beneath that concern for the peace talks was something deeper, Jos thought. Niko didn't want Azarcon to hate him. 

They've barely touched each other at all in the past two weeks, since they came to Aaian-na with Azarcon on this first mission of cultural diplomacy. Only a few instances where their hands brush together, and a few kisses while Azarcon speaks alone with various caste leaders and high-ranking sympathizers. But they're leaving in a few days, and Jos is tired of losing this opportunity to be with Niko in the place where for so long he'd dreamed they'd return together, alone.

Later that night, after they visit the Temple, he creeps into Niko's room. 

"Are you here to talk?" Niko asks. He's sitting on a cushion, and a book Azarcon lent him is in his lap. It’s an old fashioned, non-electronic one; the spine reads THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM. 

“No”, is all Jos says. He crosses the room and kneels down in Niko’s lap before Niko can offer a word of protest. All Niko does is sigh as Jos wraps his arms around his shoulders and lowers his lips to his neck. 

“If you don’t want this anymore--” Jos begins.

Niko shakes his head. “No.” He presses his lips to Jos’s forehead. “I do. But being too hasty now could make it more difficult for us to be with each other in the long term.”

Jos can’t suppress a humorless chuckle. “What long term? I don’t understand--you say you want me to remember that I’m yours, but then you don’t exactly act like it.”

“A wise man must change his actions based on what’s prudent. And there are different ways for people to belong to one another, Jos-na.” 

“So you want things to be like they were before?” Jos pulls back and stiffens. “With me just waiting all the time? Waiting for you, and wanting to be with you, and being yours while all you give me is scraps--” 

Niko’s eyes go dark and still, the way he retreats when someone has touched upon an uncomfortable truth. “I give you what I can give. I tried to offer you a place, and that place wasn’t right. I don’t hold that against you, s’yta-na. But it costs much to build a bridge between two places. More the farther away they are.” Niko pauses. “But I will never stop trying.” 

Jos rests his head against Niko’s shoulder, all the fight gone from him. And Niko’s body, his warmth, his voice, the rhythm of his breath, they all ground him again, the way they always have. 

He looks up through the window at the small white moons, memorizing their shapes and positions; he knows it’s likely he’ll never see them through this exact window and in these exact places ever again. 

 

3\. 

Jos wakes while it’s still dark. Niko’s arm is slung across his chest, and Jos kisses the fingers before he moves it with as lightly as he can. Niko’s eyelids still flutter open. He should’ve known it was impossible to do anything within a mile of a ka’redan assassin without waking him. 

“I’m glad we had this,” Niko murmurs.

Jos leans down for a quick kiss. “So am I.”

The reddish marble is cold beneath Jos’s feet as he walks through the corridors back to his own room. As he passes through the atrium he immediately sees that he’s not alone. Captain Azarcon is sitting on a cushion next to a large furry plant with cerulean flowers, a book of etchings from the Fifth Cycle open before him. He looks up at Jos, and his gaze is glassy but direct.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Jos asks. He’s sure the look on his face is guilty; he does his best to hide it, but acting was never his strong suit. 

“Something like that.” Azarcon closes the book. And Jos is certain, so certain, that he knows, and all of Niko’s words are flooding his head, I can’t ask you to lie to your captain, Jos-na. 

Jos crouches on the ground beside him and closes his eyes.

And before he knows it he’s telling Azarcon the truth.

Azarcon is silent for a painfully long time after Jos speaks. Finally his lips twist upward in a cold smirk. 

“It’s nice to know that some captains have no trouble taking what they want,” Azarcon says.

Jos shakes his head fervently. “No. Captain, please, it isn’t like that. I told you--”

“We can twist the truth in all sorts of ways, to make it seem like we were the ones to blame.”

“Captain.” Without really being able to help it, Jos reaches out and puts his hand on Azarcon’s. “I know what you’re thinking. Niko isn’t him.” 

Azarcon twitches as if to jerk away from Jos’s touch, but miraculously he lets his hand rest there as he stares ahead, as he tries to make sense of everything. 

“I made my choice,” Jos says softly. “I kept my distance for awhile, but I made my choice. And I’m an adult now. Neither of you have the right to make my decisions for me, about who touches me and who I touch.” 

There’s pain in Azarcon’s eyes as Jos turns to him, and he wishes he could do something to take it away, if only so Jos doesn’t have to remember that shrapnel-shard of history that they both share. But there’s no taking it away, only living with it. "Do we ever really get to be adults, people like us?” Azarcon asks. A question Jos knows he'd never ask anyone else. And Jos has never heard him sound so wounded, even though his voice is calm and quiet on the surface. 

That’s the thing. Jos understands the subtle modulations of Azarcon’s voice as if they were his own. The things he hides, the ways he tries and fails at hiding. And Jos wonders, sitting there like that with him, if he’s ever been able to rest with another person the way Jos can with Niko. 

Jos closes his eyes and pretends his touch can give Azarcon that solace. 

 

4\. 

"You said the area was prone to storms," Azarcon had said as they walked down the trail to the temple. "How did they prevent drownings when people knelt underwater?"

Niko shrugged. "They didn't."

Azarcon had smiled his wry smile. "Tough customers." 

Niko had smiled back, briefly, and then began to explain how drowning was integrated into the culture's belief system, but Jos had heard it before. And there was something about the way Azarcon smiled at Niko in that instant that he'd never seen from the captain before. Jos looked down at his feet and beyond, at the fringe of sea-moss that whipped in the small waves, and thought about it, and realized what it was about the way they'd looked at each other. They didn't look at each other the way Azarcon looked at him, or at Ryan, or even at Erret Dorr; not the way Niko looked at his mother, or at the brother he'd killed. 

And not the way he looked at Jos. 

Jos had turned away and walked back in the direction he'd came, pretending he was looking at a spiral-shelled barnacle on the temple stair.

“Jos-na,” Niko said, his tone of voice soft yet commanding in a way that Jos was powerless to resist. 

And Jos walked back toward them, back into the force-field of that hard-won intimacy he knew he could never be a part of, the intimacy of true equals becoming friends. 

He remembers that moment now, intensely, as he and Azarcon board the shuttle that will take them back to the striviirc-na space station where Macedon has been docked for the past week. As the shuttle-door opens and the pilot eyes them impatiently, Niko dares to put his hand on Jos’s shoulder. Before Jos’s revelation to Azarcon he would have had no trouble making that gesture, but in the past few days Niko has kept a careful, commanderly distance from Jos. 

Azarcon looks warily at both of them, but then he does something Jos doesn’t expect. He puts his hand on Jos’s shoulder right next to Niko’s. As if Jos is a conduit for some energy-message to pass between them, something they can’t name or articulate. 

He isn’t sure what to do with his own hands; he thinks maybe the right thing to do would be to rest his own hand on top of theirs, but he can’t. All he can do is look back and forth at them, at Niko whom he can touch but not always understand, at Azarcon whom he can understand but not touch, at these two men who can rarely touch and understand each other but who seem right now to long to do both. 

And, at least for this fleeting moment, his place is here, between them. And he can't imagine being anywhere else.


End file.
